2007-03-15

Gay sex versus adultery

Army generals and Republican presidential candidates are swarming around the media making the following two-part assertion: gay sex is like adultery, and therefore it is immoral. This is just a short comment on this paleoconservative point of view.

First, on the surface, gay sex is nothing like adultery. Gay sex is some kind of sexual act between two or more people of the same sex. The marital status of the participants is completely irrelevant. Adultery is when a married person has sex with someone other than his or her spouse. The two concepts overlap, obviously: both involve sex, and, if a married person has gay sex with someone other than his or her spouse, I suppose that that would constitute adultery. In fact, if a person in a gay marriage has heterosexual sex, which would obviously have to be with someone other than his or her spouse, then that too would have to fall into the definition of adultery. But the very fact that we can compare the two things, to talk about how they differ, how they overlap, and how they interact, is proof positive that there can be no equation of the two.

What I think is going on here is that gay sex and adultery are both things that Army generals and Republican presidential candidates are expected to disapprove of, or in other words, that they are expected to consider immoral. That, and the fact that they both involve a sexual act, are the only ways that gay sex is "like" adultery. Strangely enough, the public statements made by these individuals imply that the reason why gay sex is immoral is because it is like adultery, which is completely circular. The reason it is circular is that if the main reason why the two concepts are similar in some people's minds is because they are both immoral, then the immorality of one of the concepts can't be the reason why the other is immoral.

But there is another, much more important problem with the statements from General Pace and Senator Brownback: since about 1970, it has been widely understood, even in America, that fully consensual adultery is not immoral. This started with the so-called "open marriages" of the 1970s, and it continues today in various permuations. That is, many people around the world believe that the basis of the older conception of adultery as immoral, being based as it was on the idea that a wife is the property of her husband, and therefore that adultery is a form of theft, is completely passé. Nowadays, what most people see as the problem with adultery is cheating. That is, dishonesty between married people, which can of course cause immense problems and undoubtedly contributes to the high divorce rate, is considered to be immoral, just as any other kind of lying, cheating, or dishonesty is.

To summarize this last point: lying and cheating and other forms of dishonesty are considered immoral by most people; adultery often involves all of the above; therefore, adultery is immoral.

But what about "open marriage", or wife-swapping (so-called), or group sex, to name a few situations where husbands and wives sample the fruits of someone else's tree, openly, with full consent, and therefore, with no dishonesty? Is that immoral? I believe that most Americans think that it is either not immoral at all, or at least that it is much less immoral than the stereotype of adultery based on sneaking around. Furthermore, I think that sneaking around sexually by unmarried people who believe themselves to be in a committed relationship with their partner is considered to be almost as immoral as actual adultery, by most people. In other words, it's the dishonesty, not the sex, and not the marriage, that is most relevant to morality, to most people.

If adultery per se is not immoral, which as I have just explained is a very widespread belief today, then the whole logic that gay sex is immoral because it is like adultery and adultery is immoral, falls apart.

In fact, just as adultery has lost its status as an automatically immoral act because of wives' loss of their status as property, I think it fair to say that for most people in America, and, I dare say, even in the Army and the Senate, gay sex is not necessarily immoral. Like adultery, it can be immoral: sneaking around dishonestly to have gay sex would do it, unprotected gay sex when there is the possibility of transferring AIDS would also count.

So in effect, there is another similarity between gay sex and adultery, one that is probably not understood among certain Army generals and Republican presidential candidates: they are similar in that (1) both were once considered immoral, and (2) now, except for situations involving other kinds of immorality such as dishonesty or harming other people, they aren't.